6/2 - Adventure to Kuala Lumpur
We arrived at our hotel at 4am completely bombed and exhausted from the Full moon party. We slept, if you can call our fainting sleep, for about an hour and a half and then we got up and dragged and I mean dragged ourselves along with our backpacks downstairs to pick up the bus for our first leg of our long 24 hour journey. The way the travel agent explained it to us, or rather lied to us as you will see is that we are supposed to take a bus to Nathan (the east coast of Koh Samui, about 30 min bus ride) then a ferry to Suritani (some city south of the island on the mainland), then an air-conditioned bus all the way to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. So here is what really happened...Let me start off by saying that one thing I am truly starting to miss about the US is the way you get what they say you will get and not something completely different. So with that said here we go.
So we arrived at the ferry without a problem and handed our written paper tickets to the bus driver which was not yet on the ferry. They in turn gave me more tickets, all written by hand and showed me where to sit on the bus...yes bus. So we were on the bus then we got off the bus once it was on the ferry and headed up a floor or two to get a good view of Koh Samui as we left it's shores. It was really breathtaking and we took several pictures. At this point I was starting to feel all the "Fucking good buckets" from last night and I was feeling a bit queasy so I headed to the bathroom. YIKES!!! The place was dirtier than the mud in a pigs' sty! So I decided not to go and almost threw up from the awful smell. One good thing about the boat though was that there was 300 baht foot massages. So feeling horrible and tired and seeing that the massage chairs looked extremely comfortable compared to the metal chairs soldered to the ground around us, I decided it was time for a good foot massage. IT WAS AMAZING!!! Maybe it was that I was still drunk, or that I was extremely tired but the massage not only felt great but I slept like a baby for the whole ride. Andrea came over jealously and woke me from my slumber and alerted me to the fact that we had arrived. Of coarse we were still a good half mile away but she loves to be on top of her stuff and the first one off the boat. I decided to sleep the last 10 minutes which did not amuse her but I couldn't understand why she was so excited to get back on an uncomfortable bus...knowing better than to anger her I finally obliged and got in line.
Once we got off the ferry we chased our bus down and boarded. The bus was filled with locals, and we stopped two times before arriving at our final destination. At one of the stops I decided to have some local food, since I was starving to death and everyone else was eating it, Did I mention it was covered in flies...ohh yeah minor detail!!! Till this day I don't know why I ordered it much less ate it. In the end it turned out pretty good but it was definitely the hottest food I have ever tasted!!! It had grape looking peppers that were out of this world. They were so hot that I didn't even bite into one of them and my mouth felt like it was going to fall off. To quench my fire inside I picked up a Heineken which worked really well to quench the fire but quickly became warm skunky beer and it made me feel pretty horrible considering I was still drunk...Isn't beer supposed to clear a hangover??? Well I guess I was still in the drunk stage not having reached the hangover stage in the last 3 hours since we had stopped drinking "Good fucking buckets"...I love that name!!!. . The bus was an overall good experience. My only complaint was that once we arrived at our final destination and got off we realized... IT WASN'T Kuala Lumpur, nor was it in Malaysia!!! So we asked all the people who looked official and could help us but everyone starred at our ticket and looked confused. Not only that but they didn't speak any English. So with my limited Malay hand gestures I had just made up on the stop and speaking English slowly as if they even understood I tried to ask where was the bus we were supposed to take? The reply as far as I could understand was that there was no bus to Kuala Lumpur that left from here. I reasoned that myself by looking at the board of departures and checking with all the agents and they all told me the same..."No bus here" "Company no here"...Finally a tuk tuk driver told us that he knew of the company but that it was in the city and loaded us in his tuk tuk but as soon as he tried to collect payment I said no because our ticket included everything all the way to Kuala Lumpur so we got out of the tuk tuk and headed to some military looking men to see if they could help. One guy actually tried to help and spoke a bit of English but in the end he told me to call the company because there was no bus here to take. So I tried to call the company. Of coarse it took me ten minutes to dial it correctly because the phone numbers are kind of strange. You need to eliminate the country code as well as the regional code which I obviously didn't know by looking at the number but I deductively kept dialing numbers until something worked. Finally someone on the other side picked up, the really funny part is that I spent 5 minutes repeating "Kuala Lumpur" and "bus" to each other, since she didn't speak any English until finally I was super frustrated and said in English "we are at the bus station Hangnan (near the border) and we needed to know where is the bus to take us to Kuala Lumpur"...she replied "yes, no English 5 min you call back" and then hanged up. So we decided to go across the street from the bus station to a travel agency we saw there and see if we could make sense of this whole mess. At this point it was 4:20pm and everything at the bus station closed at 4:30 pm so time was running out because if it took 15 hours to get to Kuala Lumpur from here (I figured that since our trip was supposed to be 24 hours and we had been in transit for 9 hours so far) and we didn't get on a bus in the next 8 hours so before midnight we would miss our flight tomorrow from Kuala Lumpur to India. I can honestly say I started to get nervous.
The travel agent told us to take a tuk tuk to the center of the city because Samui Travel is located there and we could ask them directly what we needed to do since they were the company in charge of our travels. Problem was that they would close in about 10 min. So we quickly boarded a tuk tuk and I negotiated it down from 100 per person to 50 and then when the guy came to collect he mistakenly said 30 so I told him I would only pay that and it worked. We got to the travel agency without a problem and on the way we met a Malaysian man who also runs a bus company...what a coincidence given our situation! And he told us that it would only take 6 or 7 hours to get to Kuala Lumpur from here. That made me feel much better because I knew at worst case I could get a bus tomorrow morning and still make the flight on time.
As soon as we got to the travel agency the lady there scolded me for coming and told me why wasn't I at the bus station? I was totally caught by surprise since I was ready to kill her for not having our bus there at the station. She then said her husband was at the station with the bus and was looking for us. WHAT!!! I said in my head, YEAH right we talked to every person at the bus station practically at least any that would listen and none of them even knew about the bus about Kuala Lumpur. Trying not to make a bad situation worse I just listened and apologized and she motioned over for a tuk tuk driver and he took us back to the bus station to get our bus. Once we arrived I finally understood the problem. The BUS was in fact a minivan and instead of parking at a platform like all the other busses this MINIVAN...let me make that clear...MINIVAN was waiting for us on the side of the road parked next to the bus station. At this point I was just glad to see anything that resembled a transportation vehicle because I was picturing myself in a scooter heading to Kuala Lumpur myself, with Andrea and bags attached. Did I mention that the main form of transportation in Thailand and Malaysia for that matter is a scooter. They use them like we use cars. The use them to take groceries, lamps, you name it. I even saw a family of 4 somehow mange to fit on one. The scariest thing I saw was a 7 or 8 year old driving his little brother and sister of 4 and 2 respectively. I kept looking, expecting the 2 year old to fall off. She didn't thank god but I was shocked that parents would let their children drive down these dangerous roads much less the government. Could you imagine an 8 year old on the turnpike or driving down us1...I think not!
Getting back to our exhausting trip we got in the minivan and made friends with 2 English backpackers and one of them was actually headed to Kuala Lumpur so that made me feel happy. We laughed off our crazy story and they told us theirs which was just as bad as ours and we enjoyed the ride. We stopped at the Malaysian border and passed customs without a problem and continued on.
The MINIVAN stopped at an island...yes your reading this right an island off the coast of Malaysia and that was our final stop in the minivan. From there we were passed off to another company for the last leg of our trip. They informed us that the bus did not leave until 11pm and it was 9pm now so we headed across the street to a mall to get some food. We tried every store possible but none of them took visa so we ended up leaving the mall to find a bank so we could then head back to the mall to get some grub. Andrea and I were starving and so once we got our money we headed to the only company open since the whole mall was closing down since it was 9:30pm by this point, MCDONALDS. It was normal tasting McDonalds, my best description of McDonalds is that they don't cook anything they just warm stuff up. So I had a warmed up big mac and Andrea got a happy meal and we were happy to be almost there.
We sat around waiting a while for the bus to Kuala Lumpur and then finally the clerk there told us that we needed to take a bus to our bus which was at a different location. He said the trip should take 15 min and that our bus left at 11pm. It was 10:40 so I felt he was cutting a little close but decided not to argue. We got on the bus and to our surprise it didn't leave. 5 minutes passed and it hadn't left yet so I went over to the guy in the front and he mumbled some incoherent English like he was saying all the English words he'd learned ever and just started saying them in random order. Frustrated I decided to give it another 5 min so as not to leave the bus and get left behind by this fool. After the second 5 minutes were up I couldn't take it anymore (my frustration was exploding inside and I wanted to kill someone, we had found out earlier that the 11pm bus was the last one for tonight and that if we missed it we were stuck here till tomorrow (wherever here was???) So I left the bus and headed for the travel agency and told them in the best voice I could muster without too much frustration that we were going to miss our bus if we didn't leave soon and the travel agent replied that we had no need to worry because the other bus was also theirs and it wouldn't leave without us. That made me feel much better and so I headed back to the bus to explain it to Andrea and our new English friend.
We finally made it to the bus at about 11:15 pm and the funny thing is that we didn't leave till midnight...go figure. While waiting on the bus is when I realized the amount of Muslim women that were around. Andrea then informed me that this was a very Muslim country and I was shocked at the difference between Malaysia and Thailand given that they are so close together. Did you know that Malaysia is celebrating their 50th anniversary as a country...interesting huh.
Next to us sat 3 French lads that were quite funny because they kept playing a particular song on their cell phone and all three would dance to it. The dance was similar to the Macarena or Wipe out (the song). Anyways, they were quite entertaining because one of them refused to take the seat allocated to him and almost got in a fight with the bus driver but then finally thought better of it and ended up sitting where he was supposed to. The other thing that hit me while sitting there was how lucky we Americans are because our language is spoken in every corner of this universe. Imagine if Andrea and I only spoke French for example...we would have a difficult time getting around or communicating anything. Most signs in almost every country we've been in are translated to English and English alone. I find that pretty cool.
Anyways, the bus to Kuala Lumpur was not exciting but was actually pretty comfortable. It had the seats that fully recline and it was great. I was disappointed that the lights didn't work because I am reading a novel about Julius Caesar and it is fascinating. It has 600 pages and I was on page 500 out of 600 by that point and Andrea had finished 3 books of the same length by that point while reading half the time I did. Man she reads fast and I read slow. Hopefully Yale will fix that.
When we finally got to Kuala Lumpur we headed to a guest house recommended by our English friend and crashed. We are going to sleep now at 5am and need to be up by 11am for checkout...what a deal, at least we bargained them down to 50% of the regular charge. I will tell you all about the guest house tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Love Jose and Andrea
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